Aircraft cabin management systems can rely on manual commands being entered by flight attendants to update the state of the cabin and attendant work areas to control general lighting, passenger services and attendant services to match desired functional needs. This conventional method is considered to be static manual control, since the state of the cabin does not change until the flight attendant invokes a change by manually entering commands into the cabin management system.
A typical Cabin Interior system of a cabin management system is shown in FIG. 1. This system has Airplane Configuration Information 10, a user interface tool called the Scene Database Generator 12, which interacts with the user to create a scene database 14 which can be loaded into Attendant Control Panels (ACPs) 18 with a Data Loader 16. The ACP provides Scene Data 20 to the Lighting Units 22. The Scene Database Generator 12 can also generate Airplane Configuration Reports 24.
On some aircraft, the Cabin Interior system consists of one or more ACPs, each of which contains a computer, software, and an airplane configuration database. The ACPs interface with programmable lighting units 22 on the airplane to control airplane lighting and the ACPs contain hardware outputs used for other Cabin Interior options such as in-flight entertainment power, Cabin Ready, Cabin Temperature, Cell Phone Power and Special Purpose, e.g., configurable output and/or other functions. A typical ACP 18 consists of a touch panel and display which presents screens and buttons by which the attendant and maintenance personnel can perform control functions. The lighting units are able to store light settings for static lighting configurations or “scenes”, each of which defines the desired lighting color and intensity for the unit in a particular scene. The lighting units receive commands from the ACP to change from one scene to another.
These cabin management systems allow flight attendants to change the aircraft lighting and cabin interior options by pressing buttons on the ACP, but require manual intervention by a flight attendant to make each change in the cabin settings. There is a need for an automated, dynamic control approach, which changes the state of the cabin system based upon predefined sequences of static cabin system states, i.e. lighting, passenger services, and attendant services, instead of requiring manual intervention by the flight attendants.